It was a battle that everyone thought would be over before it began, yet it would mark the beginning of a 4-year-long bloody conflict that would rip a country apart before stitching it back together, and destroy once and for all any naively romantic notion of the glories of war. This was the Battle of Bull Run, where on a windy field in Northern Virginia in the early hours of July 21, 1861, the first major battle of the American Civil War took place. And yet, for all its historic significance, I knew nothing about any of this until a recent trip that Henk and I took to visit two moving civil war sites in Virginia.   Read More ...